By now, I strongly believe, we Malaysians are no stranger to calls for reform of our educational system.
So often have such calls been made that they cannot but leave some general impressions.
One such impression is that the system as well as its stake-holders is obsessed with examinations at the various levels of the educational ladder.
All this while, examinations have been criticized for placing too much emphasis on memorization.
This has resulted in less emphasis being placed on thinking and the pertinent skills, leading then to the deplorable state of the so-called “products” of this system, the school leavers, the university graduates.
As has often been claimed, they seem to be good only at memorizing, displaying poor ability-if any-to think.
But in reality, are they good at memorizing?
I for one am of the opinion that not only are they poor in thinking but worse they are equally poor, if not weaker, in memorizing.
I have on many occasions encountered remarks that our students can only remember things up to the time of examinations.
That may well be so because, to them, all these are worth remembering only for the exams; other than that, they are meaningless.
Surely, our students have many other things which they perfectly commit to their memory; some, I believe, are things they consider dear to them.
But the point is that what concerns us with the state and quality of our education is that we have quite frequently committed the mistakes of contrasting the importance of thinking with that of memorization.
The relation could have been less hostile.
In fact, memorization can be conceived of as being supportive of thinking; in fact, the latter requires some element of the former in order to materialize.
Such a conception is firmly embedded in the definition of thinking as “the mental act of putting what one has already known into meaningful order in order to attain what one is still ignorant of,” which has been famous in the Islamic intellectual tradition and which we have discussed several times before in this column. (For instance, IKIM Views of 22 July 2008.)
Man can only think according to what he has already known.
If, for some reasons, he has lost what he knew before, he has to regain it through some means before he can make use of it to obtain new knowledge.
If he has forgotten it, he needs to recall it first-by whatever means at his disposal-before he can proceed to think.
Mentally retaining intact what one has already known requires a certain ability to memorize.
One may minimize this arduous task of retaining every bit of what one has epistemically possessed by storing it in some device-in fact, this is what the ICT age has empowered us to do, among others-but one cannot totally do without it without incurring some risks.
Insofar as the past tradition of Islamic thought is concerned, one will surely come across true accounts of how great scholars were able to excel in both, in memorizing as well as thinking.
This simply shows that the two can grow together.
What we need to do today, among others, is to relearn and revive the manner in which both faculties were successfully nurtured in the past intellectual traditions.
